Though the pain was there. But held inside his knowing: and the knowing was that the caving blasts were a quotient got from dividing the old non-burning pain of distance by the desire-of-unknown-aim.
The car at the edge of the beach was the same that had gone from California to Mexico and back. It was not new but it had become an unknown quantity. This had caused the woman when she had been standing behind him to laugh a spiral up his spine. “Come swim,” she said, and then “your eyes are bloodshot.” He was going to leave the car behind, but not yet. They had to get from the beach to other places they were going. But at the end of the long weekend when the operation was to get under way, he would be glad to leave the car behind. But that was not what she laughed at. But if her words Travel light meant she knew of the project, then she might know he was leaving the car behind. But that would not have been what she would be laughing at. He knew her. But what did he know? The car was not new but the spokes were new. They did not have horny plates like toes. The spokes were several and he saw by all of them. The spoke of the cloudy membrane had moved, but so had another, but he could not tell if this other had moved down or up or out.
He had to change his thinking.
This thought restored the torn burn-pain, the tear of cave-crash. But so fast he didn’t spot the blue dart. For the Sun’s flood was now less. The gland of flame where he had not ventured had furled even more tight and thin.
But he remembered the launch. And that he was weightless now. Yet felt such a weight as he had not known.
Maybe it was the blind news vendor’s radar. The man had said, “I took hold, and now I got a regular radar.”
Imp Plus had said he felt the radar.
The blind man said, “I see more than you think.”
Imp Plus had asked him what was the more he saw with his radar. Imp Plus had felt the whole weight of the launch and had lost hold of a hold he had had whose presence he knew he had not then needed radar to name.
He had heard a dull gleam of metal clank into the funnel in front of a stack of newspapers. The funnel was tin, and what went into the tin was silver, his quarter but not dropped by him. “How much you give me?” said the blind vendor. “Somebody else put it in, right?”
“Right!” said another voice.
There had been more than Imp Plus there at the newsstand. There had been the other that the blind man had seen. Seen? Not out of his cold eye sockets covered by loose bandages. Imp Plus did not know right. But he knew the high voice. But then another voice had spoken different words hard to know, and tiempo was the word Imp Plus caught and remembered. This new voice was lower than the one that had cried, “Right,” and the blind news vendor was saying, “You got your kid with you.” And smacked his lips.
And Imp Plus saw not the lower voice that had said tiempo and moved on covered in fur, but the person round the Mexican fire and baked potatoes. For this was not California.
She was coming along the sidewalk, for this was not Mexico. Though Mexico had sidewalks though not around the campfire in the plateau. It was cold at the newsstand. As the person advanced, a smaller person went toward her which was away from Imp Plus and was like rising from the bottom of a scope to the top. The news vendor had said something in Mexican to the voice that had passed and now another voice that was also the news vendor said, “What’s your name? You like chewing gum?”
And Imp Plus now slid away from, then toward, the small then large crown, head, wig, vehicle of his own not scaleless yet now less heavily lighted brain. Leaned and staggered round the brain from spoke to neck to limblike stabilizer of what must be his solid sight which saw clefts, glints, craters, and full, pulsing flats potential in what were or had been clefts. But he couldn’t get off the chill axis of this distance-pain till the words came to him. Words once said to the blind news vendor: “She’s not here, she ran to meet her mother.”
For before seeing her rise from a low rim to the top of some scope of his, yes Imp Plus had been holding his child’s hand, his child. And while he had not yet been Imp Plus, he’d thought of being. For soon he had been back in California seeing crushed shells that had been remade into tubes, sticks, dowels of chalk draw angles that beamed like a flashlight right out to the curve of a flat ring. Beamed from one center on the Acrid Voice’s green blackboard. But the flat ring had two centers. And the second had the chill of space and the Acrid Voice called it empty. But from the first center he drew those angled segments that got wider and wider and like a searchlight beam hit the lip of the flat ring—ellipse, he knew ellipse — and that first center was the Sun, and the Acrid Voice was showing Imp Plus arcs of Earth’s orbit round the Sun.
And now as if from all four spokes of his solid sight — for several he found was four—Imp Plus found he saw like those white segment beams angled by the moving nest of the Acrid hand on a green slate. That is, saw with an equalness of spread down from the roof of that brain that he had half stopped thinking his, down down to the membranes along the solid limb of his sight right here close and toward him to the very brink of wherever on the four variously aimed limbs he looked from but then might see through in spots, for his sight was unsure. And he remembered dreaming his way through all the shapes and data on that slate, for it was a map to get back by. Yet instead he saw himself receding from his child, again his child running to meet her mother: to figure what hope had let go, he had to figure from the empty center of this ellipse: that is, see from the center unused by the Acrid Voice.
Until the Good Voice was telling at another time of the unknown force of solar light, the goodness of the project despite but also through its strange addition, telling also of the future and its goodness, while leading Imp Plus who was not yet Imp Plus out of the large pale green room on Earth though not to the smaller green room but to a place where he was to stretch out.
Which was what Imp Plus — with, behind him, birds, two women, potatoes, feet, and child — was doing now. Stretching out.
Else he could not have seen where a cleft now widened to show a silver pin like the points on the two floating slivers, and could not once more have gone into what he thought was his own brain. Looking for the crimson vein he found not crimson and not the shadows. He found what he then thought had made the shadows. He recalled the crease or cleft he’d half thought of, half hoped for. The Dim Echo was asking again to be laughed at. It reported 50 % increase in activity equally throughout Imp Plus which might include oscillation between hypothalamus and unknown areas. The Dim Echo reported capsule temperature lower.
Ground replied, WE HAVE BEEN GETTING THAT, IMP PLUS.
Imp Plus moved.
He spun round the four necks of his largely solid sight: and since at the same time he constantly opened and closed the brainward angle of his up-and-down scope, he made a spiral. Not the spiral of the blue-eyed woman’s laugh up his heavy spine that had turned him from his car engine; no, not that spiral but his own oscillating spiral. It was, first, all over. And a field more equal than that sweet humor of her blood and sugar laid once upon his ridges, his fissures. But what his spiral did now — though not with that polar spasm of refocusing like a funny-bone jab — was to spin in on a frontal crease which he’d half hoped half thought could get to be instead a crater or rich flat; and with the spiral’s contracted circuit but thus greater force, the spiral then stroked and spread that frontal crease, opened it much further.
A flash like a thought apart from him popped up.
It was a silver sliver. Like the slivers that hung in the light lowering near the algae. Crook-winged waves folded into it long distance. (The light was lowering everywhere.)